Quaking in their beds, sleepless Icelanders await volcanic eruption

A view of the eruption site near Keilir

Nikolaj Skydsgaard and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen
Mon, March 15, 2021

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Icelanders are yearning for some undisturbed shut-eye after tremors from tens of thousands of earthquakes have rattled their sleep for weeks in what scientists call an unprecedented seismic event, which might well end in a spectacular volcanic eruption.

"At the moment we're feeling it constantly. It's like you're walking over a fragile suspension bridge," Rannveig Gudmundsdottir, a lifelong resident in the town of Grindavik, told Reuters.

Grindavik lies in the southern part of the Reykjanes Peninsula, a volcanic and seismic hot spot, where more than 40,000 earthquakes have occurred since Feb. 24, exceeding the total number of earthquakes registered there last year.

Located between the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates, Iceland frequently experiences earthquakes as the plates slowly drift in opposite directions at a pace of around 2 centimetres each year.

The source of the past weeks' earthquakes is a large body of molten rock, known as magma, moving roughly one kilometre (0.6 mile) beneath the peninsula, as it tries to push its way to the surface.

"We've never seen so much seismic activity," Sara Barsotti, volcanic hazards coordinator at the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) told Reuters.

Some of those quakes clocked in at magnitudes as high as 5.7.

"Everyone here is so tired," Gudmundsdottir, a 5th grade school teacher, said. "When I go to bed at night, all I think about is: Am I going to get any sleep tonight?".

Many in Grindavik have visited relatives, spent time in summer houses, or even rented a hotel room in Reykjavik, the capital, just to get a break and a good night's sleep.

Authorities in Iceland warned of an imminent volcanic eruption on the peninsula in early March, but said they did not expect it to disturb international air traffic or damage critical infrastructure nearby.

Unlike the eruption in 2010 of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which halted approximately 900,000 flights and forced hundreds of Icelanders from their homes, the eruption on the peninsula is not expected to spew much ash or smoke into the atmosphere.

Experts are expecting lava to erupt from fissures in the ground, possibly resulting in spectacular lava fountains, which could extend 20 to 100 metres in the air.

Already last year authorities put an emergency plan in place for Grindavik. One option includes putting locals on boats in the North Atlantic, if an eruption shuts roads to the remote town.

"I trust the authorities to keep us informed and evacuate us," Gudmundsdottir said. "I'm not scared, just tired."

(Reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

Column: UC achieves another big win in its long battle with major scientific publishers

THE PRINTERS MOTTO
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS BELONGS TO THOSE

THAT OWN ONE --- A J LIEBLING

https://eng.ichacha.net/zaoju/freedom%20of%20the%20press%20belongs%20to%20those%20who%20own%20one.html

Michael Hiltzik
Tue, March 16, 2021

Researchers at Berkeley, above, and UC's nine other campuses

 will have the right to publish under a new system starting 

next month. (Josh Edelson / For The Times)

The University of California is declaring victory in its long battle with the world's largest publisher of scientific, technical and professional journals.

UC announced Tuesday a new four-year deal with Netherlands-based Elsevier that will make all research published by UC authors in some 2,500 Elsevier journals subject to the open-access publishing model.

That's a model in which researchers pay a fee to publish their papers in the journals, but the papers are made available to readers for free and without journal subscriptions.

We remained focused on our long-term goals, and standing by them was a path to success in these negotiations.

Ivy Anderson, University of California

By forging an accord between two scientific behemoths, the deal is perhaps the most important leap forward in the open-access movement. The university says it generates nearly 10% of all published research in the United States.

That has made it a significant partner of Elsevier, which has published about 18% of all UC output. The partnership frayed, however, due to the conflict over the two parties' differences over scientific publishing models.

The deal fulfills two major UC goals — making its research more broadly available and slowing the growth of its publication budget.

Both goals were hampered by the near-monopolization of academic publishing by for-profit companies that took root in the 1960s. The publishers paid nothing for research funded publicly, then placed the research behind paywalls and ramped up subscription charges steeply, straining university budgets.

"We're a public institution, and almost all of the research done by our scholars is funded by taxpayer dollars," says Jeff MacKie-Mason, the university librarian and co-chair of UC's negotiating team. "We're doing this to make the results of that research available to the people who are paying for it rather than making them pay again to read it."

The deal came after more than two years of brinksmanship between UC and Elsevier that involved UC's dropping its subscriptions to Elsevier publications at the end of 2018, a point when the two sides seemed to have reached an impasse. It also follows a similar deal UC reached last June with Springer Nature, the second-largest scientific publisher.

Elsevier's reluctance to yield on UC's demand to move to 100% open access wasn't surprising, given the success of its prevailing model: Its operating profit — that is, that of the scientific, technical and medical publishing arm of its Netherlands parent, Relx — came to $1.4 billion in 2020 on revenue of $3.74 billion.

"We remained focused on our long-term goals, and standing by them was a path to success in these negotiations," says Ivy Anderson, the associate executive director of UC's California Digital Library and co-chair of the negotiating team.

Although Elsevier has reached open-access agreements with other research institutions, this is the largest and farthest-reaching of its kind.

"This is something of a landmark for us," Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president at Elsevier, told me. "It really reflects the journey we've been on with our customers over the last two years."

The agreement announced Tuesday kicks in on April 1 and is valued at about $13 million. That's about what the university expected to pay if it simply renewed the former Elsevier agreement in 2018. But UC estimates that it's an effective 7% reduction in costs, given inflation in the intervening two years.

The sum is an estimate of what the university will pay in publication charges, which average about $3,000 per paper; historically, UC has provided about 4,700 papers to Elsevier journals per year.

Several of Elsevier's highest-profile journals — including the Lancet, a British medical journal, and biomedical publications of Cell Press — charge as much as three times as much.

The Lancet and Cell Press publications will be made subject to the Elsevier agreement over the next two years. The agreement means that UC effectively obtains access rights to Elsevier's journals for free.

UC researchers will retain the right to opt out of the open-access terms. But MacKie-Mason and Anderson expect the majority of UC scholars to publish via open access. Major research funding sources, including U.S. government agencies, allow publication charges to be paid out of research grants, and UC will cover those fees for researchers without grants.

We've chronicled UC's more than two-year battle with Elsevier at length, but a recap would be useful to show how far the publisher has come in that period.

The battle began in 2018, as the university started negotiating a renewal of its five-year contract for subscriptions to Elsevier's journals.

UC's faculty and administration had been committed to open access since 2013, when university policy started requiring UC authors to deposit versions of their papers or links in its eScholarship online repository; by then the repository held more than 200,000 items available to the public for free.

The UC negotiators' goal was to incorporate open access in a so-called publish-and-read model, through which its subscriptions to the journals would be merged with publishing fees for its scholars' papers in a single deal, hopefully at a money-saving rate.

UC subscription costs were then about $11 million, and it estimated that the university and its authors were paying Elsevier about $1 million a year in publication fees.

Elsevier had no interest in such a deal, MacKie-Mason told me that December. “They’re the most powerful publisher in the world, and they act like it,” he said. "They’ve been unyielding.”

Elsevier was willing only to test an open-access fee arrangement as a pilot program, but only on a small scale and separately from the subscription contract. The university felt that fell well short of the goal of converting UC's entire output to open access.

With no agreement reached, UC allowed its subscriptions to lapse at the contract expiration date, Dec. 31, 2018. The publisher allowed scholarly access to continue while it tried to reach a new agreement with the university.

But Elsevier finally pulled the plug on July 10, 2019, cutting off access to papers published after the previous Jan. 1. (Journals published before that date and subject to the prior contract were still accessible.)

MacKie-Mason and Anderson say the cutoff was an inconvenience but not a critical one.

The university had a multitude of other methods to secure legal access to papers that its researchers and students needed, including interlibrary loans, requests to papers' authors, and downloading of "preprints," which are non-peer-reviewed versions of papers deposited in public repositories. Individual articles could also be purchased from the journals.

The process sometimes involved delays, but "there was not a single article we could not gain legal access to" during the dispute, MacKie-Mason told me.

Elsevier has said throughout the dispute that it wasn't averse to the open-access model per se but doubted that it would serve all its customers equally. Moreover, the vast bulk of its published material falls within the old model — 483,000 articles published under the subscription model in 2020, versus 81,000 under open access.

But the ground has been shifting under the publishers' traditional model. The number of subscription articles has been increasing by about 5% a year since 2010, while open-access articles have increased by an annual average of 55% in the same period.

Journals devoted entirely to open access gained high prestige in the marketplace, including the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which was founded in 2001 by scientists at Berkeley, Stanford and the National Cancer Institute.

In 2018, a consortium of 11 European research agencies decreed that by 2020 every paper they fund would have to be freely available from the moment of publication, an initiative known as Plan S.

The decree meant that papers would no longer be able to appear in high-profile journals such as Science, Nature or Elsevier’s Cell and Lancet unless their business models changed drastically. After the addition of some flexible features, the plan started being implemented by funding agencies this year.

Public institutions in Germany and Sweden also dropped their Elsevier subscriptions to protest the firm’s resistance to full open access. The National Library of Sweden, which represents more than 80 Swedish universities, research institutions and government agencies, reached an open-access agreement with the publisher in late 2019. German institutions still haven't reached a deal, however.

Other major publishers have also fallen into line with open access. UC has deals with eight publishers, including the world's second largest, Springer Nature (though the terms of the open-access arrangement for Nature publications are still being worked out).

Before its contract with Elsevier, the National Library of Sweden had reached agreements with Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage and Oxford University Press, the five largest scientific publishers other than Elsevier.

Another important factor was the pandemic. Research into COVID-19 benefited from an unprecedented dismantling of the paywalls blocking access to scientific research, allowing researchers to access one another's findings virtually in real time.

Elsevier, Springer and other publishers temporarily dropped their paywalls on coronavirus-related research, though they said the free access would be limited to the duration of the crisis and wouldn't apply to other published research. Some research was posted publicly by authors as preprints and carried cautionary notices that it hadn't been vetted by peer reviewers.

The broadening of access turbocharged the spread of knowledge about the novel coronavirus and sped up the process of developing vaccines.

"Making what the public has paid for available for the public to use has been a huge win for society," MacKie-Mason says.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

After 68 years in prison, 

Joe Ligon hopes for a 

"better future"

CBS News

Tue, March 16, 2021,

The United States has long led the world in the number of children sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pennsylvania has put more juveniles behind bars for life than anywhere else in the country.

Of those people, Joe Ligon has the tragic distinction of being the oldest and longest-serving "juvenile lifer" in the country. The 83-year-old was released from prison in February after serving nearly seven decades for crimes he committed when he was 15.

"What was the first thing you did as a free man?" CBS News' Michelle Miller asked Ligon in his first U.S. television interview.

"I almost cried," he said. "Ok. But I broke down with a big smile on my face. A free man. Free at last."

Ligon, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, was incarcerated when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and Nat King Cole's "Pretend" was on the music charts. He returns to a changed world, pointing out buses and buildings he had never seen before.

"I went to the window and I looked out and when I seen all these high buildings. But I expect to see that," Ligon said. "They locked me up. They did. But they didn't lock my mind up."

In 1953, Ligon and four other Black teenagers were involved in an alcohol-fueled spree of robberies and stabbings in Philadelphia in which two people died.  

"I was guilty of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't with the intention of hurting nobody. I didn't murder anybody," he said.

"There are people out there who are gonna watch and they're gonna say, 'He stabbed someone. He committed a crime.' You say to them what?" Miller asked.

"I'm sorry that I committed a crime. I'm sorry that someone was murdered, I'm sorry about that," Ligon responded.

He concedes he did stab someone that night but maintains he didn't kill anyone and said he's a changed man.

"Did you feel remorse for what you did?" Miller asked Ligon. 

"Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I had to feel remorse," he said.

The teenagers were tried together. They pleaded guilty and were convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of ever getting out.

Bradley Bridge, an assistant defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, has represented Ligon for more than 15 years. He told Miller that he sensed injustice and was compelled to do something about it.

"Joe was convicted largely by guilt by association. There were four kids that were tried together. And a lot of the evidence against one child was considered against the other two or three other children," Bridge said. "If this case went forward to trial today, he'd probably be found guilty of a manslaughter charge...and maybe third-degree murder and might do five to ten...or ten to twenty."

His fate started to change after a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions found that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that all juvenile lifers should have a chance to be re-sentenced. But, after nearly seven decades behind bars, Ligon refused to be released on parole because he didn't want to be supervised for the rest of his life.

So they kept fighting until a federal judge recently vacated his sentence. He was released without parole. Bridge said Ligon's case is a representation of many issues in the criminal justice system.

"First of all, it symbolizes that we really should sentence people individually based on who they are and what it was that they did. So a mandatory sentence doesn't do that," he said. "And the second thing is that children are particularly unique in their ability to grow, change and reform themselves and therefore, giving an adult sentence to a child is inherently wrong."

Throughout everything, Ligon has had a supportive family, including his niece Valerie. Most of his immediate family has since died and the world may have changed, but Ligon said he's not dwelling on the past.

"Ain't nothing I can do about the past. But the only thing I can say, I just hope I have a better future," he said.

According to an estimate by the Vera Institute of Justice, it cost the state of Pennsylvania nearly three million dollars to incarcerate Ligon for 68 years, and that's without medical costs.

Ligon said he's planning his future and is considering using the custodial skills he learned in prison to get a job cleaning the offices of the lawyers who helped him get out.

Opinion

The case of the 82-year-old jfuvenile offender

 Mar 08, 2021;
By Albert B. Kelly | Guest Columnist

If you’ve never heard of Joe Ligon, it may be because he has spent most of his life behind bars.

I imagine that if there is one thing that might help give Ligon the sense that his life was not completely wasted, it’s that his story is part of a larger narrative that might change how we handle juvenile justice. When Joe Ligon walked out of prison recently, he was the oldest juvenile “lifer” in the country, having spent 68 years in prison.

Ligon began his prison life at age 15 in December 1953. He was no angel; he was convicted of first-degree murder after he and several other teens attacked multiple people in South Philadelphia — killing two and injuring six. They were accused of being in a gang, one that went on a crime spree that included robbery, assault, and ultimately murder.

Ligon has always maintained that while he was guilty of taking part in the robberies and assaults, he did not take a life — even as the prosecution stated that he alone was responsible for both murders. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that automatic life sentences for juveniles were cruel and unusual punishment. Ligon’s sentence was changed from life without parole to 35 years to life.

Though eligible for parole after the ruling, Ligon did not apply because he did not want to be on parole with all of the conditions that were attached to it. His lawyer continued to argue that sentencing a juvenile to life was unconstitutional, and a federal judge agreed — ruling that the prosecution had three months to either re-sentence or release him. He was released last month without conditions. He now begins life outside of prison at the age of 82.

There are people who will argue that if you do the crime, you do the time. I don’t necessarily disagree, but not all time is equal. There’s Black time, and there’s white time, and the two are not the same. My point is that when it comes to crime and punishment, especially involving juveniles, the discussion is a lot more nuanced that many care to admit. One of the biggest obstacles to reform is the tendency to see the crime as the only thing that is true about the accused, especially when they’re Black.

In Joe Ligon’s case, he grew up in Alabama and dropped out of school in the third grade. Functionally illiterate when he arrived in Philadelphia with his family as a young teen, he couldn’t cut it in school and got caught up on the streets doing goodness knows what until December 1953. That kid never stood a chance.

I am astounded to think about the time that has passed and the changes that have taken place between his arrest in 1953 and his release this year. When Ligon went into prison, Dwight Eisenhower, our 34th president, was wrestling with how to get us out of the Korean War. The civil rights movement as we know it had not yet begun, and no one knew the names Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. Sen. Joe McCarthy was hunting communists.

But, it’s the smaller things, the changes in the daily stuff of life that astound even more. Riding in a modern car, using today’s technological devices and dealing with the computerization of just about everything, show just how far removed the life of 1953 is from the life of 2021.

If it’s astounding to think about the history and the changes in society over the past 68 years, what about the changes in someone’s life, someone like Joe Ligon? If we can ever get to where we consider that, especially for juvenile offenders, incarceration should be as much about rehabilitation as punishment, we have to allow for the possibility that juvenile offenders can be rehabilitated to society’s benefit.

The nation’s highest court considers life without parole for juvenile offenders to be cruel and unusual punishment for the individual, and they’re right. Yet, I also believe that if we still have lives like Joe Ligon’s rotting behind bars for decades, it becomes cruel and unusual for the rest of us — whether we realize it or not.



Albert B. Kelly is mayor of Bridgeton. NJ

Pritzker Architecture Prize awarded to Paris-based duo


This 2021 image shows French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, recipients of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize. The pair founded Lacaton & Vassal in Paris in 1987 and have devoted their energies to both private and public housing, as well as museums and other cultural and academic institutions. (Laurent Chalet/Pritzker Prize via AP)


JOCELYN NOVECK
Tue, March 16, 2021

The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's highest honor, has been awarded to the Paris-based duo of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal for “prioritizing the enrichment of human life," especially in the context of public housing.

The selection of the French laureates, who have long focused on creating more liveable structures that connect to nature in even the densest of urban settings, was announced Tuesday by Tom Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award.

“Through their design of private and social housing, cultural and academic institutions, public spaces, and urban developments, Lacaton and Vassal re-examine sustainability in their reverence for pre-existing structures, conceiving projects by first taking inventory of what already exists,” organizers said in a statement. “By prioritizing the enrichment of human life ... they are able to benefit the individual socially, ecologically and economically, aiding the evolution of a city."

In her own remarks, Lacaton noted that “good architecture is open — open to life .... It should not be demonstrative or imposing, but it must be something familiar, useful and beautiful, with the ability to quietly support the life that will take place within it.”

In an interview from Paris, the pair explained how the global pandemic has reinforced their longtime view that people deserve open space and a connection to nature, even when living in housing projects in dense cities.

“It's clear that in one year many things have changed, especially in terms of our relationship with space,” Lacaton said. “We have all been forced to stay home. It has clearly made visible that living space is extremely important.”

She noted the duo had long focused on the theory that “more generous space is extremely important for everyday life. We have made efforts to always develop more space than the standard that's requested. So for us this is a confirmation .... generosity of space is extremely important for everyone and is not connected to how much money you have.”

Added Vassal: “We believe more and more that we have to open spaces to the natural elements — to air, sun, and natural light.” One of the ways the pair attempts to connect the inside to the outside, he said, is the model of an apartment opening onto a greenhouse-like enclosed conservatory or “winter garden,” which itself opens onto a balcony. “It's a way of bringing the concept of a house with a garden into the dense city,” he said.

In a 2011 project, Lacaton and Vassal transformed a 17-story Paris city housing project originally built in the early ’60s, collaborating with Frederic Druot. They removed a concrete facade and increased space for residents, adding terraces and large windows with full views of the city. In a similar undertaking in Bordeaux in southwest France several years ago, they added a “winter garden” to a 530-unit dwelling, increasing space for residents while making sure they weren't displaced during the job.

The pair also transformed the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2012, increasing the space by 20,000 square meters (215,278 square feet), in part by creating new underground spaces in the popular contemporary art museum.

Lacaton and Vassal met while studying architecture in the late '70s in Bordeaux. Lacaton then pursued an urban planning degree while Vassal moved to Africa to work in urban planning in Niger — an experience he called “a second school of architecture.” In Niger, the two built their first joint project, a straw hut made of locally sourced wood.

The pair founded Lacaton & Vassal in 1987 in Bordeaux and moved it to Paris in 2000. They have devoted their energies to both private and public housing, as well as museums and other cultural and academic institutions.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 by the late entrepreneur Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy. Winners receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.

“Our work is about solving constraints and problems, and finding spaces that can create uses, emotions and feelings," Vassal said in a statement. “At the end of this process and all of this effort, there must be lightness and simplicity, when all that has been before was so complex.”

Italy court blocks Bannon-linked plans for populist academy



Italy BannonFILE - In this Thursday, March 21, 2019 file photo former White House strategist Steve Bannon arrives to deliver his speech on the occasion of a meeting at Rome's Angelica Library. Italy’s top administrative court, the Council of State, has ruled Monday March 15, 2021, against a conservative think tank affiliated with former White House adviser Steve Bannon over its use of the Certosa di Trisulti monastery, located in the province of Frosinone south of Rome, to train future populist leaders. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, file)

NICOLE WINFIELD
Tue, March 16, 2021,

ROME (AP) — Italy’s top administrative court has ruled against a conservative think tank affiliated with former White House adviser Steve Bannon over its use of a hilltop monastery to train future populist leaders.

The Council of State ruled Monday that the Culture Ministry was correct in cancelling the concession it had given to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, or Human Dignity Institute, the ANSA news agency and RAI state television reported. The ruling overturned an earlier decision by a regional administrative tribunal that had sided with the institute.

Buoyed by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and the rise of nationalist sentiment in Europe, Bannon and the institute had launched plans to establish an academy to train populists and nationalists at the 13th century Trisulti monastery, an abbey surrounded by a forest in the province of Frosinone south of Rome.


But local residents objected and ultimately the Culture Ministry, under the leadership of the center-left politician Dario Franceschini, sought to revoke the lease, alleging a host of irregularities that the institute denied.

The center-left leader of the Lazio region, Nicola Zingaretti, hailed the Council of State decision.

“Steve Bannon and the sovereigntists must leave the Trisulti,” Zingaretti said on Facebook, vowing to work with the Culture Ministry to “return this marvelous place to the people.”

The local Catholic bishop praised the decision, saying the Council of State had done the right thing by returning the monastery “to the people of God and to the entire community.”

In a statement reported by the Avvenire newspaper of the Italian bishops conference, Bishop Lorenzo Loppa said the diocese would now work with the community to find a new life for this “monastic jewel,” suggesting it could be used as the headquarters of a foundation.

Benjamin Harnwell, founder and president of the institute, said his lawyers were studying the tribunal ruling and would decide in the coming week what if any recourse they might take.

Harnwell had previously said the Culture Ministry's decision to try to revoke the concession was politically motivated, arguing the institute was being targeted because of its affiliation with Bannon and its support for Italy's right-wing leader Matteo Salvini and his “heroic blockade of the illegal migration into Italy."

Dignitatis Humanae, which says its goal is to defend the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, had counted on the high-profile support of conservative American Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was named honorary president of the institute in February 2019. But Burke resigned in June of that year, saying in a statement he was stepping down because the institute had “become more identified with the political program of Mr. Bannon.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Britain's NatWest bank faces money laundering charges


FILE PHOTO: People maintain social distance while they queue outside a Natwest bank in Wimbledon

Tom Wilson and Iain Withers

Tue, March 16, 2021

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's financial regulator has started a criminal action against NatWest over allegations it failed to detect suspicious activity by a customer depositing nearly 400 million pounds ($553 million) over five years, mostly in cash.

The action is the first such case against a British bank under a 2007 money laundering law. If convicted, the bank faces a maximum penalty of an unlimited fine.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it was bringing the proceedings after NatWest's systems failed to adequately monitor and scrutinise activity over an account held by a British customer between November 2011 and October 2016.

Around 365 million pounds was paid into the unnamed customer's accounts, of which around 264 million pounds was in cash, the watchdog alleged.

NatWest had previously disclosed in its 2020 annual report an FCA investigation in relation to "certain money services businesses and related parties".

The business was Fowler Oldfield, a Bradford-based gold dealer and jeweller liquidated after a police raid in 2016, a source familiar with the matter said. Bloomberg first reported the identity of the customer.

In the last statement by liquidators for Fowler Oldfield, dated December 2020 and filed at Companies House, they said NatWest was the secured creditor and that the police held the company's seized assets.

Telephone numbers listed for Fowler Oldfield did not work.

NatWest will appear in court on April 14, the FCA said.

The watchdog was keeping the possibility of charging individuals under review, a source said.

The bank said on Tuesday it took the matter "extremely seriously" and was cooperating with the investigation, adding it had made multi-year investment in its financial crime systems and controls.

'SHOCKWAVES'

The case threatens NatWest with further costs for past misdeeds at a time when it has been trying to clean up its image under CEO Alison Rose, who took over in 2019.

The bank - which remains 62% state-owned after a bailout in the 2007-09 financial crisis - rebranded from the scandal-tainted Royal Bank of Scotland name last year.

"In terms of enforcement, initiating a criminal prosecution against a leading bank is like pressing the nuclear button," commented Jonathan Fisher QC, Barrister at Bright Line Law.

"In terms of reputation it is potentially very damaging, and given that anti-money laundering procedures have been around for a long time, if NatWest has fallen short, it leaves the bank with a lot of explaining to do."

Claire Cross, a partner at law firm Corker Binning, said the FCA's move would send "shockwaves" across the finance industry. "It also sets an important precedent - no-one is too big to escape the FCA’s criminal net," she added.

The company's shares fell 3% in early trading and were last down around 1%, compared to a 1% gain for the FTSE 350 banks index.

($1 = 0.7231 pounds)

(Additional reporting by Kirstin Ridley; editing by David Evans and Angus MacSwan)

PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS DEMAND THEIR PAY

Yemeni protesters storm palace with cabinet members inside

Tue, March 16, 2021

DUBAI (Reuters) - Dozens of Yemeni protesters stormed a presidential palace in the southern port city of Aden on Tuesday demanding payment of public sector salaries, witnesses said.

Yemen's Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik and other members of the internationally recognised government remain holed up inside the building, two Yemeni officials said.

Most of Aden is controlled by forces of the United Arab Emirates-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC), which had fought the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the past.

Abdulmalik's cabinet was formed last year to unite the STC with Hadi's government and fulfil a Saudi aim of ending a feud among Riyadh's allies.

The two groups are the main Yemeni factions in a Saudi-backed alliance fighting the Houthis, who control the north, including the capital Sanaa.

Tuesday's protest broke out over public services and after the government failed to pay salaries of retired soldiers, the witnesses said.

Footage on social media showed Aden's security chief, Mathar al-Shaebe, negotiating with a group of protesters and asking them to leave the security perimeter of Maasheq Palace.

The Houthis seized control of Sanaa in September 2014, forcing the then government into exile in Riyadh and Aden. In March the following year, the Saudi-led coalition launched a campaign to try to restore Hadi's government, carrying out thousands of air raids.

Tens of thousands have been killed, mostly civilians, and millions of Yemenis have been pushed to the brink of famine.

(Reporting by Yemen team; Writing by Aziz El Yaakoubi; Editing by Catherine Evans and Giles Elgood

USA
Cannabis entrepreneurs, celebrity investors light up as legalization blooms


Nabis warehouse associate David Garcia holds a tablet with cannabis orders that he uses to pick products from the shelves at the Nabis warehouse in Oakland

Paul Lienert and Jane Lanhee Lee
Tue, March 16, 2021, 

DETROIT/OAKLAND, Calf. (Reuters) - Driven by a surge in cannabis use during the COVID-19 pandemic, industry entrepreneurs and investors are gearing up for even greater growth as legalization spreads and the economy reopens.

So far, 36 states and the District of Columbia have approved medical use of marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Of them,15 states and D.C. have approved recreational use of pot.

Cannabis technology startups, including those enabling home delivery of pot, got a big boost during the pandemic as more Americans partook, igniting investor interest in companies that provide everything from cultivation management tools to compliance and e-commerce software for an industry that still operates in a legal gray zone at the federal level.

Cannabis entrepreneurs say they have to move quickly and build their brands before full U.S. legalization levels the playing field - a process that many expect to gather steam this year.

“Why are you going to Weedmaps (for listings of cannabis retailers) if you can go to Yelp? Why do you order through this or that system if you can order through DoorDash or Uber Eats?” asks Steve Allan, chief executive of The Parent Company, which has Jay-Z as chief visionary officer and is looking to consolidate smaller players following its January listing through a special purpose acquisition company.

TPCO has built its own e-commerce technology that can handle everything from business management to retail sales, said Allan.

In one of the biggest venture capital deals in the sector to date, Oregon-based e-commerce platform Dutchie on Tuesday announced it raised $200 million in a funding round that values the company at $1.7 billion.

Dutchie’s investors include former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, NBA star Kevin Durant and DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang. The company's online marketplace connects cannabis dispensaries with consumers, who can order home delivery.

Reuters has identified more than 90 private and public cannabis tech companies in North America, with total private investment in the first quarter at the highest level in 18 months, according to data compiled by PitchBook and Crunchbase.

All told, investors have poured more than $2.5 billion into cannabis tech startups since 2018.

Public investors are piling in too. Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, that target the broader cannabis industry raised at least $4.3 billion through early 2021, with $1.7 billion of that still waiting to be deployed, according to cannabis researcher BDSA.

That interest comes as shares of publicly traded cannabis companies - many of which are listed in Canada because they are barred from U.S. exchanges - have begun to rebound after a brutal sell-off in 2019.

“We’re still in the very early innings” of investing, said Harrison Aaron, an investment analyst with Gotham Green Partners, a New York-based private equity firm with a cannabis-centric portfolio.

U.S. legal cannabis sales for both medicinal and recreational use last year jumped 45%, according to BDSA.

“We don’t necessarily want things to go (fully) legal today because there’s a lot of value in our companies, and we want more time to build,” said Lenore Kopko, managing partner at Gotham Green.

Others believe entry to the cannabis industry may not be quick or easy for many of the big outside players.

“Cannabis legislation, regulations and supply chain flows create complexity that is not built into software made for other industries,” said David Hua, founder and CEO of Meadow, which sells compliance and operating software for cannabis retailers.

CELEBRITIES GALORE

Cannabis startup funding in the sector has been led by a closely knit network of investors that often co-invest with one another. That network includes Liquid 2 Ventures, headed by former NFL quarterback Joe Montana, and Casa Verde Capital, founded by entertainer Snoop Dogg.

Another of those firms, Beverly Hills-based Arcadian Capital, has invested in more than a dozen cannabis tech startups. Boca Raton-based Phyto Partners has funded 10, many of them as a co-investor with Arcadian.

The network occasionally is joined by other high-profile individual investors. DoorDash’s Tang and Twitch co-founder Justin Kan were among those backing Oakland-based Nabis, a cannabis online marketplace for dispensaries that also has a warehouse, delivery service and online financing for retailers.

There is another draw for investors beyond the immediate business opportunity: data on a brand-new industry.

For Arcadian, the torrent of data that is being generated by cannabis tech startups provides “a great mechanism to learn more about the industry,” said Matthew Nordgren, the company’s founder and managing partner.

Industry boosters say technology developed and incubated by the cannabis industry could open new pathways for retail trade in other sectors.

Socrates Rosenfeld, co-founder and CEO of Jane Technologies, the Santa Cruz creator of an e-commerce platform that has been funded by Arcadian and Gotham Green, called it "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a tech company to work in partnership with the operators in this space to build and redefine how tech and analog retail work together.”

(Reporting by Paul Lienert and Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Dan Grebler)

AAPI women more than twice as likely to report hate incidents as men, report finds



Shawna Chen
Tue, March 16, 2021, 7:00 AM·2 min read

Racism-fueled violence against Asian Americans continues to spike, with women more than twice as likely to be targeted than men, according to a report from the reporting center Stop AAPI Hate published Tuesday.

Why it matters: Anti-Asian racism escalated after the pandemic began, with people blaming Asian Americans for COVID-19, which was first detected in China.

It follows a long history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S., made worse last year by former President Trump's "Chinese virus" rhetoric.

Driving the news: Stop AAPI Hate received nearly 3,800 self-reported incidents from March 19 last year to Feb. 28. The organization warned the number represents only a fraction of incidents due to tendencies to underreport.

By the numbers: Verbal harassment (68.1%) and shunning (20.5%), or the deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans, comprise the two largest proportions of total reported incidents.

Physical assault comes in third at 11.1%.

Chinese people are the largest ethnic group to report experiencing hate (42.2%), followed by Koreans (14.8%), the Vietnamese (8.5%) and Filipinos (7.9%).

Businesses are the "primary site" of discrimination (35.4%), while 25.3% of reported incidents took place in public streets.

Of note: Though not specified in the report, women also face hate-motivated sexual violence. One attack occurred in a train station last week.


Anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic has also forced many Asian American businesses to shutter.

The big picture: Anti-Asian hate has gained more attention in recent weeks, as a string of particularly violent attacks against Asian American elders spurred outrage.

About four in 10 Americans have said it's more common for people to express racist views about Asian people now than before the pandemic, per a July report from the Pew Research Center.

Last week, Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) announced plans to reintroduce the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which would designate a Justice Department officer to oversee review of reported coronavirus-related hate crimes.

UN Women: COVID-19 is `most discriminatory crisis' for women


FILE - In this Wednesday, March 7, 2018 file photo, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of U.N. Women, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, in New York. The U.N. health agency and its partners have found in a new study released Tuesday, March 9, 2021 that nearly one in three women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes, calling the results a “horrifying picture” that requires action by government and communities alike. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, called violence against women "the most widespread and persistent human rights violation that is not prosecuted.” (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)


EDITH M. LEDERER
Mon, March 15, 2021

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The head of UN Women called the COVID-19 pandemic “the most discriminatory crisis” that women and girls have ever experienced on Monday, pointing to women losing jobs far more often than men, a “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence, and 47 million more women being pushed into living on less than $1.90 a day this year.

Emerging from the pandemic, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the world also faces more orphans and child-headed homes, an increase in child marriage, 59 percent of women reporting having to spend more time on domestic work since the pandemic began, and a digital gender gap leaving many women unprepared for the future.

She spoke at the opening of the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women whose theme this year is on women's participation and decision-making in public life and combatting violence against women and girls.


Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of the U.N. women’s agency, said the World Health Organization’s latest report shows that the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the past 12 months -- 16% -- was against young women aged 15 to 24.

A report for the commission’s session also underlined that “violence against women in public life is a major deterrent to their political participation, and affects women of all ages and ranks, in every part of the world,” she said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said every month the toll from violence against women rises -- from sexual abuse to child marriage.

“The damage is incalculable and will resound down the decades, into future generations,” he said.

The U.N. chief said the fallout from the pandemic “has shown how deeply gender inequality remains embedded in the world’s political, social and economic systems.”

Over the past year, Guterres said women leaders are among those who’ve kept COVID-19 transmission rates low and put their countries on tract for recovery while countries with less effective responses to the pandemic “have tended to be those where strongman approaches prevail and women’s rights are under assault.”

But the secretary-general said “looking across the world, we see that women’s voices remain missing from the highest levels of leadership.”

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s latest report released last week, only 25 percent of lawmakers worldwide are women and only 22 countries have a female head of state or government with Europe topping the list.

“At current rates parity among heads of government will not be achieved until 2150,” Guterres said. “That’s right, another 130 years of men making the same kinds of decisions they have made for the past 130 years and more.”

While these new numbers are little changed, UN Women’s Mlambo-Ngcuka said there are gains “to celebrate and inspire us.”

She pointed to the share of women in government in Lithuania increasing from 8 percent to 43 percent, Rwanda leading the world with the largest share of women ministers at 54.8 percent, and the percentage of women ministers in the United States rising from 17 percent in 2020 under former president Donald Trump to 46 percent in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, “a historic high.”

Despite these positive developments, Guterres said men are dominating decision-making during the pandemic.

“A study of 87 countries found that 85 percent of COVID-19 task forces contained mostly men,” the U.N. chief said.

Guterres stressed that women have the skills and expertise for top jobs, and in many countries they’re graduating from higher education at higher rates than men.

“What we need is not more training for women, but to train those in power on how to build inclusive institutions,” he said. “We need to move beyond fixing women and instead fix our systems.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka called for “big, bold steps” and urged global leaders to make space especially for young women to enter public life.

“We see them on the streets across the world, leading movements even in the face of lethal threat,” she said.